Karl Mensch Waage (b. 1915, d. 1999) was born December 15,
1915, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Influenced early on by an amateur
rock and mineral collector, he entered Princeton University in 1935
with an interest in geology. Having been introduced to the geology of
the American West by Erling Dorf, Waage’s senior thesis was on the
stratigraphy of the Upper Cretaceous Fox Hills Formation in the Lance
Creek area of Wyoming.
Waage earned his Ph.D. from
Princeton in 1946, with a dissertation on the refractory clays of the
Lower Cretaceous Dakota Group of the Colorado Front Range. Hired that
year by Yale University, he extended his work on the Dakota Group,
clarifying its relationship to the underlying Morrison Formation,
drawing attention to the importance of regional unconformities that
represented significant time hiatuses, revising its stratigraphy, and
providing an interpretation of its depositional environment.
In the mid-1950s, Waage refocused his attention on the Fox Hills
Formation in its type area in South Dakota. His enthusiasm for this
subject was to mark his research for the rest of his career. His field
studies culminated in a 1968 monograph, The Type Fox Hills Formation, Cretaceous (Maestrichtian), South Dakota (Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History 27),
describing the facies relationships, lithologic units, and molluscan
zonation. He showed that this formation represented a transition from
the environment of a clastic barrier shelf through that of the
shoreface of a barrier bar complex during the final retreat of the Late
Cretaceous sea.
This work set a standard for
paleoenvironmental studies at a time when such studies were first
gaining prominence. From the large, well-documented collections amassed
during many field seasons, Waage, with his student Neil Landman,
produced a monograph on the systematics, life history and distribution
of the beautifully preserved scaphited ammonites.
Waage was Director of the Yale Peabody Museum from 1979 through 1982. He and Carl Dunbar wrote a textbook on historical geology, continuing a tradition begun by Charles Schuchert.
Retiring in 1986, he wrote several more papers on scaphites and, in
1999, just before his death, co-authored a final manuscript on Holocene
fossils from West Haven, Connecticut, a project he had begun 30 years
earlier (see Postilla 225, “Post-glacial Fossils from Long Island Sound Off West Haven, Connecticut,” 2001).
—Modified from Neil H. Landman, Geol. Soc. America Memorials 31, 2000